Omega: How do spirits differ from ghosts? Do spirits haunt places or live in places?
Tony: People often get very confused by ghosts and spirits. For me, the spirit is somebody who has lived a life, passed before us, and is drawn back to the world often by a reciprocal love pull.
If a daughter has lost a mother, that communication is possible because mom still loves her daughter and the daughter still loves her mom. So there's a need on both sides. The medium sits in the middle and serves that need.
Ghosts are, invariably, memories and atmospheres trapped in a space. People talk about going to a very old space, such as a castle, or an old house, and if they're sensitive, they are aware of maybe a man on the stairs.
I thought for a long time that the man must get bored, standing on the same stairs for a hundred years! But what it actually is, is an extreme emotion that was expressed at some point. The man may have been incredibly excited, incredibly sad, or incredibly happy. His atmosphere ultimately, in a sense, stained the space and that emotion is now held there in space and time. As a sensitive we can go into those spaces and it's like a play being repeated time and time again.
For example, I was invited to a public house near where I live. They had a story of a lady in white who walked across the land at the stroke of midnight. I sat in this space, and, closing my eyes, I became aware of that lady. I saw her go to the next room, reach down into a crib and pick up a baby that had passed over. She walked back along the path and then it felt as if the thought just disappeared.
I was very much aware that this happened a long time ago, that it wasn't still happening. Many years ago a young woman had found a dead baby and the degree of her grief had literally stained the atmosphere. I think people could describe her as a ghost, but I now know that she passed with a child in the spirit world many years ago.
People buy into this idea that it’s scary and that the spirit is still there, but it's not. I think the atmosphere is still there—that's my understanding of what a ghost is.
Omega: What are spirits doing on the other side when they are not watching us or communicating with us? How do they spend their days?
Tony: It dawned on me during a workshop about a year ago that if we truly are mediums, it's not enough just to say your mother’s here. It's not enough to keep everything in the past tense and say, "She wore this and she did that."
If a mother is truly alive and living somewhere, she must still be doing things. She must be watching things in our world and hanging out with people she once loved.
I think these elements are very much what spirit wants to bring us, but the mind of the medium often excludes that level of detail because within our training we’re taught to say more things about them to bring proof to those in the living world.
